The Global Positioning System (GPS) is finding many useful applications in the agricultural and construction arts. One such application is in real-time recording of characteristics of an agricultural field (e.g., crop moisture, soil content, and physical objects such as trees, rocks, etc.) These characteristics are recorded either automatically by sensors or manually by a farmer who observes a characteristic while plowing, sowing or harvesting and presses a button to record the location and identity of the characteristic. At times, the farmer may drive a vehicle around his fields for the sole purpose of recording field characteristics (e.g. recording the positions of rocks or weeds in his fields) in an operation referred to as "scouting".
The present invention relates generally to recording field characteristics manually through the use of "markers". A typical prior art system has four buttons on the user interface of a yield monitor or other controller located in the cab of an agricultural vehicle The four buttons are generally labeled (e.g., "Marker A", "Marker B", "Marker C" and "Marker D"). The farmer is required to write down or commit to memory the characteristic corresponding to each marker (e.g., Marker A=patch of weeds, Marker B=rocks, Marker C=tree, Marker D=dip). As the farmer travels the field, the farmer pushes the corresponding marker button when one of the four characteristics is observed. The controller responds by recording the location and the generic marker label. Other systems allow the farmer to program the controller with a short description of the marker (e.g., "weeds") so that the controller will record the short description instead of or along with the marker letter.
Farmers have indicated dissatisfaction with such prior art systems that have only a limited number of buttons capable of recording only a limited number of different types of field characteristics. The addition of more buttons would increase the costs of the controller and is hindered by the limited size of the controller's user interface which must also have buttons corresponding to other controller tasks. Thus, if the farmer desires to record more than four different characteristics, the farmer must stop to perform the time-consuming task of re-assigning a marker button to a new characteristic. Furthermore, as stated previously, some prior art systems only record a generic marker label (e.g., "Marker A"), instead of the actual name of the field characteristic represented by that marker. In these systems, the farmer must keep a list either mentally or on paper and match up the marker name with the field characteristic later. This drawback can cause confusion to the farmer and increase the likelihood of errors.
Thus, what is needed is a field characteristic marking system to overcome these and other problems and limitations of the prior art.